Medicine
terrasig | October 25, 2006Frequent commenter, anjou, just sent along a link to a MSNBC article by Robert Bazell entitled, "Ignoring the failures of alternative medicine." The article is subtitled, "The U.S. spends millions testing popular supplements. It's a futile effort."
Bazell is chief science and health correspondent for MSNBC. Most striking about Bazell's article is that the mainstream media has generally remained quiet on criticizing the alternative medicine industry. In contrast, the scientific community has long questioned both the legitimacy of NIH's alternative medicine-focused center, NCCAM, and their…
oracknows | October 24, 2006I'm with Kevin, M.D. on this one. Not giving required vaccinations is akin to child neglect:
CHICAGO - State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests.
All states allow children to be exempted from school immunization requirements for medical reasons -- because they might have a bad reaction, for example, or have weak immune systems -- and 48 states allow exemptions for personal or religious beliefs.
To get non-medical exemptions, some states require documentation, notarized…
mementomori | October 23, 2006[Editor's note: No, you didn't miss the first 23 rules - the narrator is simply tossing them off as they materialize during the course of his normal work day. Speaking of working stiffs, unless he wins the lottery the C.O. will have more examples for you in due time]
In honor of all the doctors around the world who labor with diligence and equanimity to give their patients the best care possible, I would like to share some entries from my little black book stuffed with practical tips for the practicing physician. This is merely an attempt to show readers how clinical decisions are made, or…
clock | October 21, 2006Bacteria Use Radioactive Uranium To Convert Water Molecules To Useable Energy:
Researchers report in this week's Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth's surface. Think that's weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy.
The Neurobiology Behind Why Eating Feels So Good:
The need to eat is triggered by the hormone ghrelin. Ghrelin is produced in the gut and triggers the brain to promote eating, but it remains to be determined precisely how ghrelin affects different parts of the brain. A new…
ddobbs | October 20, 2006
Image from the "For Family and Friends" page of Eli Lilly's Xigris website.
_________________________________________________________
Even among the other scandals the drug industry has produced lately, the behavior described in the latest New England Journal of Medicine stands out as particularly stunning. According to a Perspective written by Peter Q. Eichacker, a National Institute of Health senior investigator in critical care, the drug giant Eli Lilly, seeking to incrrease sales of an anti-sepsis drug, Xigris, that had fallen short of its blockbuster expectations (in 2002, e.g., Lilly…
cortex | October 17, 2006Are doctors like scientists? Are their practices primarily guided by experiments and empiricism? Or are doctors more like artisans, unwilling or unable to test the effectiveness of many of their treatments? The Washington Post provides an interesting example of the-doctors-as-artisan model, and the results aren't pretty:
For the past 30 years or so, doctors have routinely given pregnant women intravenous infusions of magnesium sulfate to halt contractions that can lead to premature labor.
Now a prominent physician-researcher is calling on his colleagues to stop using the drug for this…
thusspakezuska | October 15, 2006It's Ask a Science Blogger time again....
...A reader asks: Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you?
Here's hoping my doctor and pharmacist SiBlings will take on this question and give us a medical perspective. I'm going to approach "is it good for you?" from some other directions.
In this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, ten women share memories of Ramadan, traditions from their home countries, and offer up a few family recipes. Ramadan and fasting sounds like it is very good for them.
In Istanbul, women embroider handkerchiefs…
tsmith | October 13, 2006Flu shots are rolling out, and there should be no shortage this year. A few new articles remind the public of the importance of these vaccinations, especially in high-risk groups (something that I touched on here regarding data showing that vaccination during pregnancy can help protect the newborn).
You can find the guidelines for target vaccination groups here. Essentially, it includes anyone immunocompromised or with conditions that make them increasingly susceptible to serious complications of influenza; those 50 years of age and older; and children from 6 months to five years old.…
j7uy5 | October 13, 2006I ran across a press release (
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/uoa-ltf100606.php">1
href="http://www.brightsurf.com/news/headlines/26739/LSD_treatment_for_alcoholism_gets_new_look.html">2)
pertaining to a journal article (‘Hitting Highs at
Rock Bottom’: LSD Treatment for Alcoholism,
1950–1970)
on the use of LSD for treatment of alcoholism. When I saw it,
I
thought I'd blog about it. As it happens, several people beat
me
to it.
Anyway, the topic is sufficiently compelling that I am going to post it
anyway, and try to add a little to what has already been said…
mementomori | October 11, 2006I've said it before and I'll say it again - in fact I just said it to a patient of mine who came in for his ten-year checkup after battling one of the nastier cancers coiled in the soft, verdant field we call "life." (He's cured now, thank God.) He expressed dire unhappiness with his weight, so I said it to him:
"Exercise Beneficial In Breast Cancer Radiation Therapy."
Hmm...this may be a tad inaccurate. I think what I was trying to say was that exercise is beneficial for cancer survivors. Unfortunately my words of wisdom seemed to have the same effect on this patient as the advice I gave…
cortex | October 11, 2006Apparently, it's time to dump on science journalists. Plenty of bloggers, it seems, just accept it as a statement of fact that science journalism sucks, and is in desperate need of fixing. Various solutions have been proposed, from the supply side (educate ignorant journalists) to the demand side (make people want to know more about science).
Personally, I think these complaints are ridiculous, and that scientists don't know how good they have it. Let's review the facts, shall we?
1) Most science stories in the mainstream media are simply paraphrasings of press releases put out by the…
oracknows | October 10, 2006It figures.
After posting yesterday about whose responsibility it is when a cancer patient rejects evidence-based effective treatments in favor of quackery and then progresses, I would have to be made aware of an update in the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix.
Ever since Cherrix's story first rose to national prominence a few months ago, I've been periodically blogging about it. Cherrix, as you may recall, is the the teenager diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma late last year who underwent chemotherapy, went into remission, and then relapsed a few months ago. At that point, he refused to…
revere | October 7, 2006If you haven't gotten your flu vaccine yet or you don't plan to get one you are in the majority. Of course if you read this site you are in a small minority, so I'm guessing many of you plan to get a flu shot. Which is good. I'd also ask for pneumovax, too, a vaccine against pneumococcal pneumonia, a frequent secondary infection in influenza. But back to flu vaccine.
There is some evidence of cross-protection between seasonal influenza vaccination and H5N1 infection. Since one component of the seasonal vaccine, H1N1, shares a subtype N1 antigen with H5N1, this isn't implausible. More…
mikethemadbiologist | October 6, 2006According to Time Magazine's Christine Gorman, China and Japan are trying to bribe the voters who will decide the next W.H.O. president. It's disgusting that an organization which can be critical in saving lives and combatting infectious disease can be so easily corrupted. Gorman writes:
It's been an open secret for years that the race for Director-General at the World Health Organization is subject to a lot of horse-trading among the so-called member states of the United Nations. But this year's election-in which there are now 13 candidates-is shaping up to be the most unseemly to date.…
cortex | October 6, 2006Atul Gawande is a working surgeon, and yet he also finds time to write some of the best medical journalism around. His latest article on the "industrialization of childbirth" is a real gem.
The degree to which birth has been transformed by medicine is astounding and, for some, alarming. Today, electronic fetal-heart-rate monitoring is used in more than ninety per cent of deliveries; intravenous fluids in more than eighty per cent; epidural or spinal anesthesia in three-quarters; medicines to speed up labor (the drug of choice is no longer ergot but Pitocin, a synthetic form of the natural…
j7uy5 | October 6, 2006This is
another one of those pilot studies that may or may not go
anywhere. Even if it doesn't it might contribute to our
theoretical understanding of major depression.
One nice thing about it is that
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopolamine" rel="tag">scopolamine
is old; presumably, it is not very expensive. That attraction
is offset, though, by the fact that the pilot study used intravenous
scopolamine.
One
interesting aspect of this study is that scopolamine is an
ingredient in nightshade, jimson weed, mandrake, and henbane.
It blocks a family of cholinergic receptors:…
tsmith | October 3, 2006I write on a somewhat regular basis on here about vaccines: new research, new shots, addressing skepticism about how well they work or if they're related to autism, etc. Recently, several vaccine stories have been in the news that I've not gotten to yet, so consider this a vaccine meta-post. More after the jump.
The first story is timely in that it discusses the influenza vaccination (and we're heading into that season). Allow me to share an anecdote first. When I was pregnant with my daughter in 1999, I was in graduate school and the lab I worked in was affiliated with a hospital. So…
thusspakezuska | October 2, 2006Hi folks. Last Friday I had a botox treatment for my migraines and it does seem to be having some good effects already. I'm going to give myself another day or so off from blogging since the computer can be one of my migraine triggers.
Please let me stop you before you get a chance to write that clever comment about how at least I'll always have a youthful appearance because of the botox treatments, or some such other clever riposte. I have heard them all. FYI, botox treatments for migraine have nothing in common with beauty treatments, and I had to fight tooth and nail with my…
tsmith | October 2, 2006Ah, another day, another paper for the anti-HIV establishment to glom onto and misrepresent.
Last week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association published this paper examining the relationship between HIV load and CD4 T-cell decline:
Context Plasma human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) RNA level predicts HIV disease progression, but the extent to which it explains the variability in rate of CD4 cell depletion is poorly characterized.
Main Outcome Measures The extent to which presenting plasma HIV RNA level could explain the rate of model-derived yearly CD4 cell loss, as…
scientificactivist | October 2, 2006The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was announced this morning, with one half going to Andrew Fire and the other half to Craig Mello, both for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi). The discovery of RNAi added a new layer to our understanding of how cells regulate gene expression and protect themselves from unwanted invaders, and, even more significantly, equipped biomedical scientists with a powerful new tool for studying protein function. Using RNAi, scientists are now able to dissect the genome of an organism, knocking down mRNA (and hopefully protein) expression, gene by…